Tokyo Cigar “The Other side of ILL” Illmatic tribute mixtape

For the 20th anniversary of Illmatic i decided to highlight Nas as well as the producers that made the album the masterpiece that it was. I gathered up different beats from Primo, Pete Rock, Large Professor, Q-Tip and L.E.S. and went bezerk real quick. I do so much production that i forgot how much fun it is to just catch wreck over a classic beat you grew up on. I sequenced their beats to match the tracklist on Illmatic and i also got Tone Blunt to fill in the Brooklyn guest spot role.
I also used lines from Illmatic to title the freestyle.

The second part of the tape is me remixing Illmatic era Nas. It was dope to zone out to the vocals and really appreciate how incredible he is as a lyricist.

This took about a week to hook up and i gotta say it was mad fun to put this together because it brought the fan out of me. I was in the middle of finishing up the project when the homie Slew hit me up and we started to build about why Nas is so dope and he was dropping so many fly stories i decide to tape it and put it throughout the second act.

Salute to Nas, AZ, Olu Dara, Primo, Pete, Extra P, L.E.S. and Tip for what they did. That album raised a whole generation of MC’s to sit down and really think before they put pen to paper and by extension birthed other classics in that already exceptional era.